When preparing to move to New Zealand, I anticipated many "normal" things would be different or more difficult. However, one thing I did not see coming is the challenge of cooking. Many factors contribute to this situation including an understocked kitchen in both supplies and utensils, differences in the measurements used in recipes, new foods and brands, kilojoules instead of calories, and a grocery store that is a 10 minute walk away.

All these individual factors collided tonight and exploded in my small kitchen. For dinner, I made a meal I have made countless times before in the states, chicken taco chili. I had to make it on the stove top instead of in a crockpot because I don't have a crockpot. I used way too much chili powder (I would like to blame differences in measurements for this one but it could have also been user error). The tomato sauce I bought tasted and smelled like ketchup. The usually yummy chicken taco chili tasted a little like ketchup, slightly burned to the bottom of my not non-stick pan, and was almost too hot to eat. Literally, my lips were burning and Justin and I had to eat a Feijoa to cool off.

I recovered from the dinner disaster and opened up the cupcake mix I bought to prepare the 12 cupcakes I volunteered to make for the Breast Cancer Awareness fundraiser at work tomorrow. We are selling the cupcakes for $3 each to raise money and were asked to make sure the cupcakes had "a touch of pink". I struggled with what to bake because I wanted to make something special but lacked supplies and my go to recipe sights call for many ingredients that are not available in New Zealand. Plus, to add a complication, the cupcakes needed to incorporate pink. I ended up buying a New Zealand brand cupcake mix that included mix, pink icing and sprinkles, and liners. Perfect!

So back to opening up the cupcake mix....the cupcake liners were mini. Like tiny. I couldn't take mini cupcakes to sell for $3 each and I have absolutely no baking supplies in the house. I had to stop on the way home in the rain to buy a muffin pan. I considered crying or just showing up at work with no cupcakes. Luckily, my sweet husband saw me about to break down and offered to walk the 10 minutes in the rain to buy me a new full size cupcake mix and icing (b/c I have no mixer so I can't make icing). Now it is 9 pm, the pink (thanks to the pink food coloring my husband grabbed) cupcakes are finally in the oven and I am on the couch!

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comments:

We can sympathize. Those little things make a lot of differences. We faced many of them in MX a few years ago. Since we traveled back and forth every few months, we always returned with a lot of things not available down there (clothes, certain food products, etc). Hang in there, girl.

Oh no - I am so sorry! I'll send you an email with some sites that I've found that are helpful. Also, it may be worth it to check out one of the local re-sale stores (op shops) to get some cheap baking gear that you can just get rid of later on.